Tuesday, January 27, 2015

We're very fortunate we haven't been hit with a huge snowstorm as they have in Boston, for instance, where my daughter lives. We can easily get out and drive over to the Museum, for instance. So let's accentuate the positive.

For starters, I made two replacement beams for the grid boxes from white oak. They have been drilled, except for the holes at the support beams, which I want to mark in place.

You can see the original wood had some problems.

The bolt heads were mortised into the wood, and then held in place with four nails and a thin strip of wood over that. That weakens the structure a little, and contributed to the crack seen above. So we will probably avoid the mortises.

Here are the new beams with primer. Rod will order new nuts and bolts for this project.

After that, it was time for more painting in the smoker. I finished prepping the other three arm rests and painted them with white primer.

And then, the floor got its second coat of brown primer. As I mentioned before, the wet primer looks quite a bit like the finish brown color.

So the end is in sight! I also went over to check on the 321. The tarp is leaking slightly in places, which is somewhat discouraging, but the car should probably not get much worse before we can put it inside one of the new barns.

As promised, Tim has started working on the seats for the 24 (1024). The nearer frame is about 15' long, making it hard to handle. These may be a real challenge to restore. The only seating in the car is the two long bench seats against both side walls. This arrangement caused these cars to be generally known as "Bowling Alleys".

And in fact, I believe that's exactly what they were used for when unexpected service delays occurred, and passengers would otherwise get bored. I'm not sure whether it was the conductor's or the motorman's job to reset the pins.

Finally, Max has been hard at work resetting the trolley wires over the leads to Barn 7. The barn leads have been a weak link in the overhead system for quite a while. It may not be obvious from this picture, but it represents a big improvement over the previous condition of the wire. Thanks, Max!

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About This Site

The "Hicks Locomotive and Car Works" banner at the top is taken from original artwork of the company, which was in business from 1897 to 1911. The picture behind it shows the four restored CA&E wood cars at the Museum, starting with #309, which was built by the Hicks Locomotive and Car Works in 1907.

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